Home Built Rotary Baskets Control Depth Of Chisel Plow

Home built rotary baskets contorl depth of chisel plow TILLAGE EUIPMENT Chisel Plows (9) 12-6-9 Leslie Johnston, Mason, Ill., built his own rolling baskets and uses them as gauge wheels to control the depth of a chisel plow and field cultivator. Before building them, Johnston looked at baskets neighboring farmers had bought commercially. "I noticed that they always seemed to be repairing them because they weren't built heavy enough, so we decided to build our own," says Johnston, who mounted 6-ft. lengths of oil well sucker rod on 8-in. dia. spindles with a 1 1/4-in. solid steel shaft down the center. There are two bearings on each of the three 6-ft. sections of basket. The rods mount in a spiral on each basket so they won't bounce in the field. "We farm land with a lot of clay in it and it has a tendency to run together. The rolling baskets grind up any clods the plow digs up and yet don't pack the soil like a culti-mulcher or other tillage tool would," Johnston notes. To get enough down pressure on the baskets to work the soil, Johnston chains the frame of the rolling baskets to the chisel plow frame. When the transport wheels lower the shanks to the ground, all of the weight of the plow is transferred to the rolling baskets. Depth is controlled by changing the length of the tie-down chain. "The chisel plow weighs about 2 tons so there's a lot of weight on the baskets. It works great and lets us run the shanks at any depth. We like to work it shallow and still get a good workup of the soil," says Johnston, noting that despite the heavy-duty construction of the baskets, welds still break occasion-ally. Johnston also uses home-built rolling baskets on his field cultivator. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Leslie Johnston, Rt. 1, Box 16, Mason, Ill. 62443 (ph 618 238-4318).

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